I listen to about half an hour of Today as I’m getting ready each morning. Occasionally, as yesterday morning, I end up shouting at the radio. In this case, it followed a report on whether or not Nottingham is the crime capital of the UK.
After some discussion about the statistics and where towns figured in the crime table*, John Humphrys asked (from memory): “But the Government say that crime is going down, don’t they?” What did that have to do with anything, I demanded from the stereo. The relative levels of crime in different places in a snapshot of time bears no relation at all to the change of crime frequency over time. The fact that you can produce a report calculating likelihood of being a victim of crime in different geographic locations says absolutely nothing at all about the overall crime rate apart from that there is some crime. Grr.
*The word “table” appears to be the 100,000th word on this blog. Woo.
On a more purile note, I noted that News 24’s three attempts to do a live piece from Nottingham yesterday were all interrupted by entirely seperate groups of young men either shouting or doing wanker signs behind their reporter…
Don’t they do that to everyone? No? Just me then.
Seriously, Nottingham’s an easy target at the moment and Humphrys wound me up. I like him, but he shouldn’t let the devil’s advocate thing get in the way of reasoned argument. I turned the radio off. Having said that, I’ll turn it on again tomorrow.